The Unintended Industrial Policy Benefits of Covid-19 in Africa

Abstract

This chapter examines a seemingly heretical subject matter, that is, the unintended benefcial impact of the otherwise disruptive novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease it causes code-named COVID-19 (e.g. Ssali 2020). First detected in Wuhan, China in December 2019, COVID-19 was declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” on 30 January 2020 and reclassifed as a pandemic on 11 March 2020 (WHO 2020). That COVID-19 knows no social, political, gender, or racial boundaries is no longer debatable (WHO 2020). What has escaped scholarly scrutiny is the positive albeit the unintended benefcial impacts of COVID-19 (Baldwin and Eiichi 2020). Are there verifable industrial policy dividends of COVID-19? This question is important for two distinctive reasons – one theoretical and the other pragmatic. Theoretically, free-market fundamentalism – which has dominated national and global political economies for 40 years – associates globalisation with the sovereignty of private capital over sovereign states (Bhagwati 2004). Globalisation arguably signifes the supremacy of economic liberalism over economic nationalism. It signifes the death of countryspecifc industrial policies that are theoretically faulted for undermining the market’s allocative efciency and promoting patronage politics (Kelsall et al. 2010).